The present invention relates to a device for removing and conveying an injection-molded piece in an apparatus for fabricating a bottle-shaped blow-molded container of a biaxially oriented plastic. More specifically, it relates to a piece process line which has the steps of drawing a preformed piece from the mold core of an injection molding machine, cutting the gates off of the pieces, and temporarily cooling the pieces before heating them to a temperature adapted for a biaxial orientation process.
Polyethylene terephthalate resin has a wide range of applications in the field of molding material into synthetic resin bottle-shaped containers because of its superior physical properties and characteristics.
In molding a bottle-shaped container of polyethlene terephthalate resin, there is adopted a so-called injection blow molding process in which a preformed piece of cylindrical shape with a bottom is injection-molded, and is then biaxially oriented blow-molded to produce preferable characteristics.
Therefore, such a bottle-shaped container is sequentially molded by a process having the steps of injection molding the piece, removing the piece thus injection-molded, and clamping the piece in a blow molding machine for blow molding the same.
It is desired to automate all of these steps to complete the molding process of such a bottle-shaped container. However, a considerably thick gate is integrally formed at the piece thus injection-molded owing to polyethylene terephthalate characteristics, and this gate of the piece is manually separated with an exclusive cutter.
However, since each run of the injection molding process takes much longer than each run of the blow molding process and since the injection-molded pieces are not so large, a number of such pieces are produced in each molding process. Accordingly, it requires even longer to completely fabricate the bottle-shaped containers since the numerous pieces thus injection-molded must be independently manually separated from their gates, resulting in remarkably inefficient productivity.